


Confrontation

by Ruingaraf



Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-10
Updated: 2012-10-10
Packaged: 2017-11-16 00:42:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/533588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ruingaraf/pseuds/Ruingaraf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If you throw your life away to protect your partner, you really have to be prepared for the hard questions after you turn up alive three years later. Chris and Jill friendship, raises the possibility of Chris/Jill but no more.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Confrontation

The hardest part of losing her, he thinks, is how there had been no definite moment of parting, no goodbye. She’d been by his side, part of an inseparable team fighting insurmountable odds as always. Bullets flying. Pain, adrenaline. Then a look in her eyes, sharply blue and determined and she was gone, even as he reached after her. Cold wind had blown through the window against his back. Afterwards there had been no closure either, the teams had searched and searched for her body but never found it. Even staring at her death certificate, standing in front of her tombstone, he could never quite manage to move on.

But in a way, he had let go and ceased expecting her to return. It surprises him exactly how much when he sits in a BSAA-issued Niger hotel room two full weeks after he’d found the living dead in more ways than one. He stares across the table at one half of their seamless two-man team and finds that they don’t fit together quite as flawlessly as they once had. The jagged scars from where her presence had been ripped from his life have scabbed over, if not healed. And he knows that it was the same for her, having survived whatever drugged-up hell she’d been through alone. It isn’t surprising she has trouble confiding in him as much as she once had, after that.

The silence is long. Deafening, even. Neither moves in favor of watching the other carefully.

—-

She thinks, maybe, she might have once had feelings for him, though the exact nature of them puzzles her still. Maybe that was the P-30 fogging and hazing her memories, leaving big gaps and bigger irregularities. The doctors watching her in quarantine had said it was because coming in and out cryogenic sleep had altered her ability to perceive time, that the distortion should be temporary. She hopes so, because right now the person sitting across from her is a familiar and yet a stranger, like a a childhood friend drifted away from in later years. Maybe she had loved him (she didn’t think she’d jump to her death for just anyone), maybe she hadn’t (or were those ghosts of memories showing fondness for a partner, a brother) but right now it is neither and if she hadn’t been the sort of person to walk into the tiger’s den in her old life she suspects she might have avoided him indefinitely.

As it is, he’d left the door open and she’d come to restore their close-yet-far equilibrium, and only now that it’s too late to turn back does she realize she isn’t sure how.

Suddenly, she is seized by the idea that she is nowhere near the same person she once was. Fear floods through her until she notices little things that are different about him, too. His hair’s cut differently, longer and somewhat sun-bleached. He has more scars and bigger muscles, had obviously pushed his strength to the limits in recent years. But more than anything he is roughened, more exhausted and defeated than she remembers. Hardened, both by battle and by time. Even the way he looks at her, his guard is not quite down and he seems as if he half-expects her to fly across the table and try to claw his eyes out again.

She shudders at the memory.

—-

Across the table that seems a canyon, she shivers. The air conditioning in the room is on full blast (he’d found it helped, easing nightmares of red eyes, blistering heat, and the ten thousands ways things could have gone wrong in that place) but there’s a pang of guilt that he hadn’t considered how frigid the room probably seems to anyone else.

“Do you want tea?” It seems a foolish, inconsequential thing to say after so much has happened and that now, finally, they are alone together.

But she simply nods, answers in a careful and tense tone that mirrors his own. “I’d like that.”

—-

Busying himself with the kettle makes things a little easier on his end. She seems to disappear into her own little world again, curling her body posture inwards and running her finger across swirling patterns in the wood of the low table.

Since Russia, tea had become a bit of a tradition between them. Even before they’d parted, he’d still hated the stuff. But it was hard to reject it entirely now, not when it has memories attached. As half a belated punchline and half something to ease the crumbled gorge between them, he also picks up the mostly-empty bottle of vodka he’s been nursing the past week.

Still. Earl grey and measured silence was likely a shaky bridge for repairing a friendship. Chris breathes out and brings the mugs over.

—-

Things are too tense. The tea is poured in measured silence. Both of them just stare, trying to figure out what is different, what is the same. If the other still has the same sense of humor. Their equilibrium is off and they both know it.

Chris breaks eye contact first and splashes a small amount of vodka into the tea. Without speaking, Jill takes the bottle from his hand and does the same. Her hand brushes his— something that years ago, would have been less than nothing, but today is sharp and jolting.

Her skin is cool, paler and softer than he remembers. There hadn’t been much sun in a cryogenic chamber, after all.

Her grip is how he remembers it looking, but stronger. She holds the bottle tighter until her knuckles are white and he is half-afraid she will crack the glass.

She is tense. And the fact that he can tell that lights a new hope within him.

—-

Tense, perhaps, is the wrong word. Jill is afraid. While Chris is seeing the return of a friend and partner from the grave, she is coming back to the ghosts of an old life after living a nightmare. She’d sacrificed her life for him, or she’d meant to, and she doesn’t even know why.

He is going to ask. It’s the biggest question on his mind, she can tell, but that knowledge isn’t comforting.

Everything inside her screams for her to run away and never talk to him again.

Her memory is patchy, hazy, she recalls her sixteenth birthday but not her high school graduation. The mansion incident, but not the first time she’d met Chris. Others are weaving, too-colorful and dreamlike, drug hallucinations wrapped around and indistinguishable from reality. Her childhood cat riding with her on a helicopter in Bulgaria. Inviting Parker into her home in Raccoon.

For the first time she considers that she might not be mentally equipped for this conversation.

She dismisses it. If she walks out now, she’ll never come back.

“It’s been a long time.”

She makes the first move.

—-

It’s his turn.

“I never expected to see you alive again.” Cut the small talk, go for the direct route. Peel off the bandage quickly and it’ll hurt less. An old philosophy, but a trusty one that has served him well even in their years apart.

She seems only momentarily taken aback by his abruptness, setting her drink down and flicking her eyes up to look him in the face. “I didn’t expect to live.”

Silence again as the unspoken question hangs.

“Would you have done the same for me?” she asks, carefully directing the conversation.

His answer comes easily, instinctively, and is out of his mouth before he even considers she might be making a point. “Absolutely,”

“Without a thought?” Both eyebrows raised, she leans forward on her elbows in the ghost of a familiar gesture.

He scowls, taking the fact she had to ask again as doubt. “Of course,”

“Then you know why,” she murmurs, breaking eye contact and leaning back in her chair again. Suddenly, her nails seem to be something of matchless interest.

“That—” Almost instantly, he is incensed. “So you didn’t even think about what you were doing?” His voice beings to rise.

“There was no time.” Her defense is icy, sharp, and she crosses her arms over her chest and edges away, still not looking at him. “I made a judgement call.”

“In less than a second you decided my life was worth more than yours?!” He is shouting now, survivor’s guilt funneling into anger.

“In less than a second I decided I would do whatever it took to keep him from killing you,” she shoots back, jerking her head up to glare at him. Seeing her eyes, he becomes acutely aware of how angry he’s made her.

“I could have gotten out of that!” Slamming his hands down on the table, he stands, matching the intensify of her stare.

“Bullshit, Chris!” She joins him in shouting, high-pitched and sharp. “He was going to kill you and I did what I had to!”

“Just chucked yourself out a window without regard to the fact I’d have that on my conscience forever?!” he snarls, pulling no punches now.

“It’d have been worth it if he’d died with me! It was a tactical decision.” Her eyes are wild, cornered, and if it is possible to look equally furious and terrified she manages it beautifully.

And it is there he know he has her, lowering himself to quietly restrained speech. “Tactical decisions don’t happen in less than a second. That’s instinct. That’s gut.”

She seethes quietly, not offering a response. Silence settles again, and a minute passes as they both do their best to calm down.

Jill lets out a sigh and puts a hand to her forehead. “Let’s not talk about this now.”

Normally, Chris would call her out on this, say she was trying to avoid the subject. But something about her tone is tired, vulnerable, shaken. He lets it drop.

“…would you still want to work with me? Professionally, I mean.” He changes the subject, but to something only marginally less heavy.

“You’re assuming a lot, that I still want to work in this field,” she mutters, letting out a disused sound that is almost a chuckle. Seeing the incredulous look on his face, she amends herself. “I do. I just… need some time.”

“We’d need to get used to working together again.” he points out, body posture slowly relaxing from the earlier scuffle.

She nods, but directs the subject away again. “All this time… have you been working solo?”

Dropping back into the chair, he measures his response carefully. “When they let me.”

Jill looks less than impressed by this fact. “That’s the last thing I’d have wanted you to do, if I had died.”

“You think just because you died, you get a say in what I do with my life after that?” Just like that the air is back, charged and electric.

She flinches. His eyes soften, the moment passes.

“Don’t care what you’d have wanted. I didn’t want a new partner.” he murmurs.

“I’d have told you that you were being stupid,” she informs him, reaching forward to take another sip of her drink.

“You’re telling me now, aren’t you?” He almost manages a lighthearted tone, but not quite.

“Imagine if you’d gotten killed because you refused to take a partner with you.” Her voice isn’t quite sad, more chiding than anything else.

“Then I’d be dead,” he snorts. “But I’m not, and neither are you.”

“Yeah… I guess not.” Pensive, she lets out a long sigh and holds up her teacup. “Cheers?”

“Cheers,” he echoes, tapping their cups together.

Things might not be the same as they were before between them. They might not ever be the same, but despite everything, they are both alive. Both of them are still breathing and fighting and if nothing else by this point both of them are masters of getting right back up after their whole worlds had been shattered. This will be nothing more than a speed bump, in the scheme of things.


End file.
